tag: MediaTek

Chipmakers
Next month, GlobalFoundries will host a job fair in Portland, Ore., according to reports. The company hopes to hire former Intel workers. These are workers who lost their jobs as part of Intel's recent layoff.
Anokiwave, a developer of chips for the mmWave market, has announced a foundry alliance with GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries will make so-called Silicon Core chips on a f... » read more

In the quest to get SoC power right as early as possible in the design flow, it still holds true that the biggest impact occurs at the beginning of the project, with diminished results as a design progresses through the flow toward tapeout.
[getentity id="22186" e_name="ARM's"] big.LITTLE architecture has gained a lot of traction here, prompting MediaTek to introduce its Tri-Gear big.Medium.... » read more

Today, it seems to be all the rage for automotive manufacturers to try to continuously one up the competition by announcing a new transmission that has more gears or “speeds." (Popular Mechanics did a nice article about why you would want more gears.) Basically, transmission designers want to keep the engine operating at or near its peak operating efficiency point and extend the operating ran... » read more

Last week I was in Taiwan, presenting at and attending CDNLive. It is always great to see the local progress. MediaTek presented on their adoption of Perspec System Verifier, highlighting how they increased throughput of test generation from 1 to 100 test cases per hour. Realtek reported on their use of JasperGold technology, as well as on their Palladium adoption, achieving between 30x to 50x ... » read more

The silicon foundry business is heating up, as vendors continue to ramp their 16nm/14nm finFET processes. At the same time, they are racing each other to ship the next technologies on the roadmap—10nm and 7nm.
But the landscape is complicated, with each vendor taking a different strategy. [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"], for one, plans to ship its 10nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="fi... » read more

SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) and GlobalFoundries announced the establishment of a new Advanced Patterning and Productivity Center (APPC). The $500 million, 5-year program will accelerate the introduction of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technologies into manufacturing. The center is located at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany, N.Y.
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Qualcomm recently announced the new Snapdragon 820. The cell-phone chipset is based on Samsung Electronics’ new 14nm LPP (Low-Power Plus) process, the second-generation of the company’s 14nm finFET process technology. What’s next? Qualcomm is developing the Snapdragon 830. “Snapdragon 830 leaks indicate that the chip will sport 8GB of RAM, an enhanced Kryo custom architecture, and fabbe... » read more

It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with SemiEngineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the Pants-On-Fire meter may be applicable to politicians, we like to thin... » read more

Differentiation is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and in some cases much more expensive for chipmakers.
The traditional metrics of faster performance, lower power and less area/cost, which are leftovers from the PC era, no longer are a guarantee of success despite the fact that they are still baseline metrics for many designs. Even new metrics such as ecosystem completeness, w... » read more